Cambridge University members now have trial access to the Social History archive , which provides access to primary source material including unique newspapers and census records, and includes access to most of the newspapers in the British Newspaper Archive.
Please tell us what you think about this resource using our feedback form.
The Social History archive allows access to a large collection of digitized newspapers across the British Isles and replicates much of the content currently available on the British Newspaper Archive.
With over 1,800 titles and over 40 million pages dating from 1700 to the 2000s, this resource can facilitate research across a range of disciplines
The Social History Archive is the largest online collection of British and Irish primary source material, providing access to 3.5 billion transcribed records and 375 million digitized scans of original records in over 2,800 separate collections. These records cover British history and its colonial expansion into Ireland, India and the wider world.
The 1921 Census of England and Wales includes 38 million records covering every person in England and Wales on 19 June 1921. It’s searchable by over 35 fields including keyword, name, address and employer.
World Heritage Sites: Africa links visual, contextual, and spatial documentation of African heritage sites. The materials in World Heritage Sites: Africa serve researchers in African studies, anthropology, archaeology, architecture, art history, Diaspora studies, folklore and literature, geography, and history, as well as those focused on geomatics, advanced visual and spatial technologies, historic preservation, and urban planning.
Collections within the archive include:
Earthen Architecture of Mali, Morocco, and Egypt There is a wealth of earthen architectural heritage the world over and thus a widespread challenge to preserve this important legacy. From entire cities to monumental sites to intricate decorated surfaces, the range and complexity of earthen architectural materials and applications makes conserving this heritage a formidable task. The images in this collection are from a survey conducted by the Getty Conservation Institute documenting different examples of earthen architecture at risk in North and West Africa, including Mali, Morocco, and Egypt.
Photographs of Lamu Island Collection The Lamu Island Collection of the Trust for African Rock Art (TARA) includes photographs taken by David Coulson and came out of his photographic contribution to the volume, ‘Lamu: Kenya’s Enchanted Island'(2009) by George and Lorna Abungu, along with Carol Beckwith, Angela Fisher and Nigel Pavitt. These images depict Swahili life and culture, a culture which has been evolving since the 7th century, AD. Lamu, one of Kenya’s original Swahili settlements, is located in the Lamu Archipelago, and is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This town provides us a glimpse of how the various cultural influences of Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and Asia combined to form Swahili society. This rich history is reflected in the language, art, cuisine, architecture, and social practices in Lamu. The photographs in the Lamu Island Collection capture elements of Lamu’s material culture architectural elements, imported porcelain plates and other household items, Swahili art and design reflected in everyday objects as well as Swahili social custom and practice.
TARA – Trust for African Rock Art The David Coulson Africa Heritage Collection represents several decades of photographic documentation beginning in the 1980s. Coulson is internationally recognized for his photography, as well as his advocacy for preserving Africa’s cultural heritage. He is the co-founder and Chairman of the Trust for African Rock Art (TARA), and he has worked as a consultant for the United Nations Environment Program. His photography has been shown internationally, and he has authored several books, including African Rock Art: paintings and engravings on stone (1996) and African Rock Art, written in collaboration with Alec Campbell (2001).
Featured in this collection are images capturing the cultural heritage of various sites, including the ritual art of the Stone Churches of Lalibela and various ruins in Niger and coastal Kenya. Coulson also depicts in this collection ritual and everyday social practices within these contexts, including everyday life in the Kalahari Desert, a major Rock Art landscape.
Caribbean Newspapers, 1718-1876—the largest online collection of 18th- and 19th-century newspapers published in this region—will provide a comprehensive primary resource for studying the development of Western society and international relations within this important group of islands. This unique resource is essential for researching colonial history, the Atlantic slave trade, international commerce, New World slavery and U.S. relations with the region as far back as the early 18th century.
Created in cooperation with the American Antiquarian Society—one of the world’s largest and most important newspaper repositories—this collection provides students and scholars with easy access to more than 150 years of Caribbean and Atlantic history, cultures and daily life. Featuring more than 140 newspapers from 22 islands, this resource chronicles the region’s evolution across two centuries through eyewitness reporting, editorials, legislative information, letters, poetry, advertisements, obituaries and other news items.
Please tell us what you think about this resource using our feedback form.
Containing over 47,000 images drawn from files at The National Archives (UK), British Mercantile Trade Statistics, 1662–1809 charts nearly 150 years of British trade and shipping in remarkable detail. Throughout this period, Britain’s increasing naval capabilities and the expansion of lucrative maritime trade networks fuelled significant economic growth. Frequently built upon exploitation and enslaved labour, the establishment of British trading outposts and plantations throughout Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Caribbean laid the foundations for a worldwide empire and secured access to sought after commodities, such as sugar, tobacco, and textiles. This comprehensive collection includes trade ledgers, registers, and indexes that supply detailed statistical data on trade throughout the “long eighteenth century”, a pivotal era in the development of British and global commerce.
The Black Women Radicals Database(BWRD) historizes and visualizes Black women’s radical political activism in Africa and in the African Diaspora in efforts to build academic, political, and community engagement, dialogue, knowledge production, research, and education about Black women’s significant legacies as socio-political agents of radical change.By housing a database of historical and transnational Black women activists and leaders, the BWRD seeks to overcome the erasure of Black women’s political leadership, organizing, theorizing, and socio-political movement building in Africa and in the African Diaspora that has often been ignored in favor of Black and white cis-heteronormative male charismatic leadership, especially in the field of Black Politics.
BWRD serves as a vehicle to center Black women’s historical political memory, scholarship, epistemologies, and leadership in socio-political movements that may not be taught in academia and in community and public spaces. The Database is free for educational use.
Women featured in the database include:
Queen Nzinga of Angola – “one of the most celebrated African women to resist European colonisation.”
Stella Mukasa – “a Ugandan women’s rights activist and human rights lawyer.”
Lilian Ngoyi – “a South African anti-apartheid activist, politician, and political prisoner.”
Olive Morris – “a Jamaican-born, British political activist, and feminist leader who was active in the British Civil Rights Movement and the feminist and squatters’ movements.”
This online bibliography records publications on Africa of interest to students of Africa, principally in the social and environmental sciences, development studies, humanities and arts. Some items from the medical, biological and natural sciences are included. The criterion used is potential relevance to a reader from a social sciences/arts background. The whole continent and associated islands are covered, with selective coverage of the diaspora. This volume aims to cover material published in 2022 together with items from earlier years not previously listed. The editor is always very glad to hear of any items omitted so that they may be included in future volumes. He would be particularly pleased to receive notification of new periodicals, print or online. African government publications and works of creative literature are not normally listed.
Africa Bibliography is published in an online edition. This is a fully searchable database of both the current volume and past volumes. The online version consolidates records collected from the bibliography’s foundation in 1984 up to the current volume. The result is a rich and interactive resource for scholars interested in the study of Africa. With user-friendly search functionality and links straight to the full-text of articles or library catalogues, and full bibliography reference export tools to bibliographic managers, the online version enables researchers to locate references quickly.
ejournals & databases services 
